2012 Draft Prep: Mixed League 5x5 auction

After branching out for the American League and National League auctions, we kept our 5x5 mixed-league auction in house. So as you might expect, the 12 participants more or less went by the book.

No player went more than $11 over his (admittedly conservative) projected auction value, and the two who went most over -- Starlin Castro and Troy Tulowitzki -- just so happen to play the thinnest position in Fantasy. So if you came hoping to see a bunch of reaches, better luck next time. Nobody did anything to make anybody fall out of his chair.

Perhaps that's a good thing. After all, if this auction is meant to serve as an example to the masses, it should be as middle-of-the-road as possible. But the danger in an auction that follows the projected values so closely is it might give you a false sense of security. Not every auction -- particularly not every mixed-league auction -- has the highest player go for only $42. In leagues where everyone subscribes to the studs-and-duds approach, the first-round types might all go off the board in the $45-50 range, which will of course lead to dwindling dollars later in the auction, thereby creating value picks.